Le Carton | Georgian wine dinner (გამარჯობა)

     

In October we took 2.5 days to cook a table full of Georgian food for 25 people to soak up 3 trips worth of wine. That afternoon we got through 31 bottles* from 12 different producers** plus a litre of cha cha and at least two toasts and to think we thought, Oh it's Sunday, we'd better save everyone a cork.

Thanks to everyone we didn't know who came and said it felt like Georgia when you left. And to everyone we knew who still came and we still know and said let's do it again and 'I didn't have a single bad wine' and the girl who said she'd like us to throw a party in her living room (CALL ME) — thanks to y'all too.

Thanks also to the Georgians for your wines and your recipes, and especially to Ènek for checking we bought the right spices and wrote the right facts.

I took some pictures before it got dark. Unfortunately this was also before the food was out of the oven and anyone was there.

გაუმარჯოს!


*6 of them are in my Christmas guide for The Morning Claret.

** Ramaz Nikoladze (Imereti) — Mariam Iosebidze (Kartli) — Ének Peterson (Imereti) — Didimi (Imereti) — Georgian Vine Foundation (Kakheti) — Lagazi (Tusheti) — Vino Martville (Samagrello) — Pheasant's Tears (Kakheti) — Jeremy and Emily (Racha) — The Wine Thieves (Kakheti) — Zurab Topuridze (Guria) — Giorgi Makaridze (Imereti)

    

   

        

Harvest in Racha, Georgia | Our Blood is Wine

Harvest with Emily and Jeremy 

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Racha, Western Georgia

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6 October 2017

Then the next day we made some wine...

'Dinavolino' 2015, Giulio Armani

I’m a sucker for a specific sort of unspecific bottle labelling. 

Generalities in a world as specific as the wine one are right up there on my list of some of the most charming things in the world; a notch only below corduroy pants, basket collections and big format bottles with flip-tops and no labels. I associate etiquettes that state a precisely made wine’s percentage as imprecise and its grapes as unknown as belonging to the kinds of wines not intended to go further than the tables of the maker's friends and families. 

So, the best ones.

I also associate this sort of loose labelling with Italy. 

“Dinavolino,” listed on the menu as a ‘field blend,’ is one of these wines: precisely made with 25% imprecise varieties, 25% Ortrugo, 25% Marsanne and 25% Malvasia di Candia Aromatica. And Italian.

The field belongs to La Stoppa’s head winemaker, Giulio Armani, and is where he makes his own wines since 2005 as Denavolo after the mountain that looks over his 5 ha of sloping, calcareous vineyards in north western Emilia-Romagna. The vineyards reach up to 400 m (with two parcels planted between 500-600 m) above the not too distant sea level, and the grapes that make “Dinavolino” come from 28-year old vines at the bottom of this slope, which starts at 350 m. 

They’re hand picked, de-stemmed and fermented on the skins for up to two weeks during which they undergo up to 7 pump-overs in the first few days to extract as much as possible. The wine is then aged in steel.

Ok so that’s one way to describe it, but here’s another: “Dinavolino” is like a summer storm system rolling in. It tastes like the air smells before it breaks: fleshy fruit like deeply pregnant clouds hanging heavy like a late August orchard. Heady winds of dried oranges and cloves at Christmas time mixed with sun-baked earth and the telltale green-purple glow of storm electricity. Then it breaks and the rain thrashes the cracked earth to expose hot limestone under low-growing basil, sage and dusty saffron. (Plus all the elevation stuff).

Tasting notes:

Orange Skittles-orange in the glass with aromas of orange peel curling on the stove, Amaretto cookies and lady bug bitters. The palate is a mouthful of a very ripe, very fleshy papaya-pineapple fruit salad with torn basil but not in a sickly, mom don’t make me eat the rest of this, way but more a: ’Hey mom did you know that for all that sun hitting these south facing vines I can still deduce a vein of fresh squeezed OJ acidity from those cool mountain nights?!’ 

Grate on some orange zest for its pithy bitterness and serve.

//

“Dinavolino”

Denavolo, Giulio Armani 

25% Ortrugo, 25% Marsanne, 25% Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, 25% unidentified varietals

Emilia-Romagna, Italy

4 months skin contact

D.I.Y Georgian wine in 10 (easy) steps

(You've already picked the grapes and punched a hole in your bucket cus that's obvious stuff.)

Step 1:

Roll your qvevri into a friendly winemaker's marani and bury it, packing it in with sand.

Step 2:

Set up your gear.

All of it.

Step 3:

Put some grapes — stems, bugs and all — into the bucket with the hole in and balance this on something high up but less precarious than some uneven bricks. 

Wash your feet and get in.

 Start  

s
t
o
 m

 p i n g.

Step 4:

Should look like this ↓

Step 5:

Around this point you'll probably realise you're going to need to get out and clean another vessel to put the juice in.

Get out and clean one or learn from our mistake and do it earlier.

Step 6: 

Pour juice into new vessel.

Marvel at it.

Taste it.

Step 7:

Get back in again and get your friends working too 'cus you have a shitload of grapes to get through and the romance of pressing your grapes by foot wears off sooner than you might think.

 Step 8:

You're 3 hours of stomping in and the neighbour has already come out (twice) and added you on Facebook just — you think — because he can (because you can't understand him).

You haven't eaten anything.

It's crazy hot even though it's October.

 Draft in anyone else.

"LOL"

↓

Step 9:

Gently press the stomped grapes with a hand press.

(This is optional but recommended if you don't have a lot of grapes but you want a lot of wine).

Step 10:

With skins/stems: Transfer juice and desired amount of skins into qvevri (not too full!) and wait for alcoholic fermentation to start. Do some punchdowns. Wait for your desired length of maceration, remove skins/stems, wait for malolactic fermentation, wait some more. You've got wine.

Without skins: Transfer juice into qvevri and wait for fermentation to start, do some punchdowns, wait, wait for malolactic fermentation, wait, wait some more. You've got wine.

Go drink someone else's wine. (That afternoon we drank Ènek's).

This will be Emily and Jeremy's second vintage, made from a blend of Mujuretuli, Aleksandrouli and Kabistoni grapes grown by Engus Natmeladze. Their documentary on Georgian wine, Our Blood is Wine will be released next spring. 

You can taste a bottle from their last vintage at Le Carton's Georgian Wine Dinner on Sunday. Two words: Georgian BOJO.

Need something to eat with your new wine? Read my how-to on how to butcher a lamb.

'Tsolikouri - Krakhuna' (no skins) 2016, Ènek Peterson

Me on  drinking what we bottled in June in October while sorting grapes: 'Cool, this is the second time I've drunk from this bottle'.

Me on the time we went down Ènek's qvevri for The Morning Claret.

Me on the one bottle* I have writable memory of after drinking bottles and bottles of the stuff for three days: 

Tasting notes:

Looks like dappled light across an orange ocean floor.

Smells like dry mandarins and crystal honey.

Tastes like sunshine zest. A Krakhuna-forward tropical fruit salad with stems on.

Feels like jello going down so, supple. Here be no angles.

//

Tsolikouri - Krakhuna 2016

Ènek Peterson

Tsolikouri + Krakhuna (no skins, 3 x on lees)

Imerti, Georgia

We'll be pouring Ènek's wines, both skins and no skins, all without etiquettes, all 2016, for Le Carton's Georgian Wine Dinner on 29 October.

*Perhaps interesting to note that this is the one bottle of Ènek's we didn't drink with Ènek, hence some memory. (Hey Ènek!)